Can I Cook Recipes from Famous Restaurants?

Copycat restaurant recipes, or “restaurant recipe clones,” are very easy to find on the internet, at least if you are looking for recipes from your favorite chain restaurants. However, there are copycat recipes then there are vaguely similarrecipes. Many online recipes try to either improve the recipes from restaurants, substitute ingredients, or make them more healthy rather than to meticulously recreate every flavor and detail. You cannot know how reliable they are until you cook them. In some cases, you may be able to tell a lot from any accompanying photos. A good recipe clone should look the same as well as taste the same.

Some of the most successful chain restaurants, however, publish their own cookbooks or give some of their recipes online. If you check out the restaurant’s website, you might find one or two.

In addition to cookbooks from the restaurants themselves, there are, of course, copycat restaurant cookbooks which feature multiple recipes from multiple well-known restaurants. Although various authors produce these kinds of cookbooks, the leader of the pack, and the gentleman probably responsible for getting all this copycat stuff started, is Tod Wilbur, the kitchen clone recipe king. If you’re looking for restaurant recipes, he’s the guy to deliver.

Wilbur, has written more cookbooks than I would care to list in one article, and he also has a website, YouTube channel, and is the host of CMT’s Top Secret Recipe, as well as appearing on numerous TV shows, some of which, like Oprah, and Dr. Oz, I’ll have to forgive him for, as despite the misinformation spread in these shows, his recipes are among the most accurate, if not the most accurate, you can get. You can see some of his TV show episodes, other TV appearances, and his own videos on his YouTube channel.

I’m not sure why you would want to cook recipes from some of these places, but they are there if you want them!

There are a great many recipe clone websites built on Blogspot for many of these individual restaurants. I cannot attest to how long the originators will get away with this, before the restaurant slaps them with a cease and desist order for using the company’s name in their domain. As for the recipes, as far as I can tell, they are copies of the recipes from Todd Wilbur’s books and perhaps some others, although I cannot say for sure. This is not illegal, by the way, as you cannot copyright a recipe, only its expression.